The Vendor & Bench Turnaround report answers the question you can’t answer from memory: which of my vendors actually keeps my work the longest, and what are they charging me for it? It covers outside trade shops and your own bench jewelers side by side, because “who is slow” is the same question whether the bench is down the hall or across town.
What counts as one trip
A work order’s task list is made of steps. Consecutive steps held by the same person are one trip — if your setter does both “set 4 stones” and “tighten prongs”, the piece doesn’t come home in between, so that’s one out-and-back, not two. The trip’s cost is the sum of those steps’ costs, and its due-back date is the one on the last step.
If the piece goes to a caster, comes back, then goes out to the same caster again later, that’s two trips.
The columns
- Avg days — calendar days from sent to returned, averaged over the trips that have come back. Weekends count, because the customer waiting for the ring counts them.
- Longest — the worst single trip in the window. Worth a look when the average seems fine.
- On time — of the trips that were given a due-back date, the share that came back by it. The number in brackets is how many trips that percentage is based on.
- Trips / Still out — how many went out, and how many haven’t come back.
- Cost / Avg per trip — what you were charged.
Click a vendor’s name to see every one of their trips.
“Past due right now” is the one to act on
A trip that is still out and already past the date it was promised shows as past due, in red, both as a badge at the top and on the vendor’s row. That’s the only figure here you can still do something about today — everything else already happened.
Past due deliberately does not count against on-time %. Nothing has been returned yet, so it isn’t a late return; if it counted, phoning a vendor to chase a piece would quietly change their score. Once the piece comes back late, it becomes a late return and then affects the percentage.
Why some rows show a dash
- Avg days is ”—” when nothing has come back yet. A piece still out doesn’t get counted as zero days, because that would make a vendor sitting on your work look fast.
- On time is ”—” when no trip in the window was given a due-back date. JewelTrak won’t invent a 100% out of nothing. If you want this column to work, fill in the due back date when you send work out.
Dates it uses
Trips are filtered by when the piece was sent, not when it came back — the question is “what did I send them in this period”. For an outside vendor that’s the ship date; for a bench jeweler, who you don’t ship to, it’s when the step was assigned, and the finish date stands in for the return.
Work that’s listed on a job but never assigned to anyone doesn’t appear at all — nobody has held it.
See also
- Repair Profitability — whether the jobs themselves make money.
- Vendor Performance — the merchandise you buy from vendors, rather than the work you send them.